UP AND DOWNSTAIRS

Jeremy Musson (John Murray, £25)

Even today we are fascinated by big country houses, set in their beautiful gardens and vast estates. They provide a link with the past, with perhaps the greatest nostalgia reserved for the relationship between master and servant.

There is probably a good inherent reason for this, as this glorious book suggests that most people in Britain must have had an ancestor in service.

Back in the Middle Ages, a virtual army of servants would have attended the country house gentleman and his family.

As we move through the centuries, they would have become fewer but certainly more professional in their tasks, from housekeeper to butler, valet to scullery maid, and more part of the family, both upstairs and downstairs.

Musson is an architectural historian and his book brings us to a banquet of daily life with the perfect anecdote.

Sometimes the staff would be completely invisible, with the kitchen bell the principal means of communication. At other times the trusted household would be almost inseparable from its peers.

The hierarchy within the servants’ quarters is one of the most intriguing aspects of this book.

The decline in these prestigious houses and those who served there was accelerated by the Second World War.

Before that time, the “village” atmosphere of life below stairs thrived.

Romance was possible, too, but marrying outside this special society was frowned upon with the risk of dismissal. Yet even a lord could ask for the hand of a dairy maid.

The author will be discussing the book at the Oxford Literary Festival on March 20.

See www.oxfordliteraryfestival.com, box office 0870 343 1001.